(8:36 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

I promised myself I wouldn't do this

Critique of Moral Illusion

The roots of moral enlightenment reach back furthest of all into the past--and for good reasons. For with regard to morality, the deepest question of all enlightenment is decided: the question of the "good life." That human beings are not really what they pretend to be is an age-old motif of critical moral thinking. Jesus provided the model in his attack against those who harshly judge others: "How wilt thou say to thy brother, 'Let me pull the splinter out of thine eye,' when, behold, a plank is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite!" (Matthew 7:4-5).

The critique in the New Testament already assumes an artful doubling: wolves in sheep's clothing, moralists with a plank in their eye, Pharisaism. From its first moment, this critique of morality proceeds metamorally, here: psychologically. It assumes as a basic principle that the "outward" moral appearance is deceptive. A closer inspection would show how moralists in fact do not serve the law, but cover up their own lawlessness by criticizing others. Matthew 7:4 contains psychoanalysis in a nutshell. ... What Jesus reaches is a revolutionary self-reflection: Start with yourself, and then, if others really need to be "enlightened," show them how by your own examples. Of course, under the normal conditions of the world, things proceed the other way around: The lawgivers start with others and it remains uncertain whether they will also get around to themselves. They refer to laws and conventions that are supposedly absolute. But the wolves in sheep's clothing enjoy looking at these laws and conventions more or less from above and from outside. Only they are still allowed to know about the ambivalence of things. Only they, because they are lawgivers, feel the breath of freedom beyond the legislation...

Christian ethics of self-reflection, the return to oneself in making judgments, is political dynamite. Since the "freedom of a Christian person" suspends every naive belief in norms, Christian cooperation and Christian coexistence are no longer possible on the basis of state government, that is, of coerced communality, but only on the basis of community (communism, socialism). The real state needs blind subjects, whereas society can understand itself only as a commune of awakened individualities. This establishes the deep bond between Christianity and communism, of which the anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tried to remind us. For the rules according to which life in the anarchist commune is ordered are free, self-imposed bonds, not alien, hierarchically imposed laws. The commune dreams of a permanent renewal of the law through concensus.

The original idea of the church still contains something of this communio-model. Of course, this model degenerates quickly in the transition to the organized church. Thereafter it lives on, estranged and truncated, in the great religious orders. The official church, however, develops more and more into a parody of the state and into a coercive apparatus of wondrous proportions. This schizophrenia was rationalized for millenia to come by the church's teacher, Saint Augustine, in his doctrine of the "two kingdoms," the divine and the temporal--which the Augustinian monk, Luther, continued to maintain. That in this doctrine, Augustine applies the concept civitas to the religious community signals its political corruption. It may seem curious but understandable that only with the modern movements toward democracy has a fundamental Christian thought again come into political play. Western democracies are basically permanet parodies of religious anarchism, peculiar mixtures of coercive apparatuses, and orders of rreedom. In them the rule applies: an illusory ego for everyone.

Herein lies at the same time the Catholic irony in the modern world. For Catholicism, with its dogma and its absolutist organization, protudes into a liberalized social order like an archaic hulk. It is still against the temporal order only in the sense that it maintains its perverse alliance with the centralized power of states, just as it had done with the western Roman Empire, northern European feudalism, and with the absolutism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That is why today's central powers, which have at least learned to play the liberal game a little, are somewhat embarrassed in their relations to the openly authoritarian Vatican. Only with Mussolini's fascism could Catholicism be brought back into the loathsome modernity of the concordats.

This preamble is perhaps useful for understanding the point of departure for the later critique of morality. In the course of its history, Christianity repudiates its own moral structure, a structure of self-reflection superior to conventions. In a word, it itself becomes a conventional coercive organization. It thus degenerates from the free standpoint of metaethics, which, with a clear view of reality and with a love full of reason, says what one should do, to the trite standpoint of "Thou shalt." Originally directed against Pharisaism, it has become through its political success the most hypocritical ideology the world has ever known. (Critique of Cynical Reason, 40-42)

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